vrig

I guess you could play 2 DMs. Why do you want to do this? Seems an odd stipulation to want IWBs to overlap but without using overlaps.

Garnacho seems excellent now. My third top scorer in season 1 with 14 goals, practically all as a supersub when chasing a game.

My first thought was "aggression gets you booked, bravery gets you injured." But no, what he said. Edit: Just to add, when building teams I personally tend to try and pair a dog with a cat. By that I mean I typically want to have one CB with high aggression alongside one who's maybe a bit more cerebral. The same goes for midfield pairings for me.

The Direct Counter attack 433 preset is my favourite of the lot. Performs right out of the box and easily tweaked to suit any team with a bit of pace and work rate.

On the tactical familiarity point, a lot of really useful TI's have no bearing on it. You can tweak your tackling intensity, pressing trap, your cross engagement, and your line behaviour to suit the match, for example. Transition instructions are also all 'free' in that regard, as are your final third and approach play instructions (aside from passing length and tempo of course).

Nothing looks "wrong." There's some risky role choices, but you might find that the benefits outweigh those risks.

If you're really worried about how you'll do defensively, changing the wingbacks to fullbacks as suggested is a good move. But honestly, if you're good enough to get 100 point in the Championship it's hard to imagine you'll fail to get 40+ in the Premier League, and you might handle the step up better than you expect. I'd personally see how you fare for a bit before making changes.

I think this post offers a good explanation:

I've just finished season one with Brighton playing a low block in every match, 442 most of the time, with my 'Tactical Style' down as Park the Bus according to the game. Finished 4th with the 3rd best defense in the league behind the usual suspects, so it's definitely possible to overachieve with it. I don't doubt it might have been an easier season if I hadn't set myself the challenge of playing defensively, because setting up a high press is just ridiculously easy most of the time, but I can't agree that there's only one way to win, at all.

That's surprising. I have this issue regardless of role/duty selection. So to prove to my idiot virtual assistant that his opinion is worthless I switched to 2 attack duty strikers and dropped my CMs into the DM strata. How dyou like that gap Andrea Maldera!?

I'd be inclined to start with a 433 with Messi a Trequartista off the right and see if he needed moving into the middle based on the play. You've got the Carillero role for De Paul and a BBM for Mac Allistair, plus it puts Enzo in front of the defence which looked right to me. The real trick of the formation is how De Paul and Molina just locked down that right flank between them, allowing for Messi to leave it alone when he felt like it. Nothing wrong with a 442 replication either of course. A 4411 with Messi treq'ing it up behind pressing forward Alvarez could also work. Either of those and you're pretty much looking at a 'Nike tick' midfield which would be easily set up, and you could save going asymmetric by focusing play down the right to encourage Messi to drift that way - along with Mac Alistair, who seemed to be bloody everywhere. Either way, it'd be a narrow shape with Di Maria the odd man out stretching the French defence on the left.

Really cool idea. I'm surprised you haven't opted for a flat 343 as one of your base formations, since that would give you coverage against both 343s and the relatively common 442 diamond and its variants. I'd imagine if you used a 451, 352, 442, and a 343 (all flat), you could quite comfortable match up any formation in the game using roles, duties, and marking instructions. Some creativity would be needed facing a Brazilian box formation, but aside from that the matchups would be straightforward. But that's where the pesky limit of 3 slots gets you I suppose! Certain roles are sure to end up being leaned on a fair bit for this approach. You mentioned the wide centre back already of course, but I could envisage the defensive winger being crucial for its ability to really chase after opposition fullbacks in support, or track wingers effectively on a defend duty.

No way on earth would I change the whole style of play. Imagine training a possession game all preseason and then your manager shouts ten minutes from time "Form of Simeone's Atletico!" at you. You'd probably kick him. Personally I up time wasting. If I'm using Play out of Defence and it's getting particularly dicey, I might swap that for Pass Into Space. Besides that, just subs really. I generally find it fairly easy to hold a lead. It's a lot more difficult chasing one, for me anyway.

You're first sentence is basically the point I was making. That guide looks great though and has literally just reminded me that the team talk feedback screen exists for the first time in years! We might be getting the right information after all, just later than we expect.

I find this to be a very strange part of the game personally. The red faces indicate a bad reaction, green good. That makes it seem simple and straightforward, but I suspect the information being relayed back to us is misleading, whether by intention or not. As an example, if you praise your team for going 3 up and they all look chuffed, or whatever, I find the chances of conceding seem to increase. Whereas the 'concentrate' shout will show up a load of red faces, suggesting a munity is on the cards and the players are about to down tools. However it reliably seems to be the better shout if your side is ahead. So basically what I'm saying is I don't really trust the game when it tells me that morale is wrecked when it comes to shouts. I think it's a liar and a cheat!

I definitely wouldn't say so. Based on what I can remember, that Greece team basically had 3/4 dedicated man-markers, a sweeper behind them and two targetmen to lump it up to. Morocco have been compressing space as much as humanly possible. In attack they tend to get the ball to the wide players to get them in 1v1s against defenders to create something.

See Louis van Gaal's Manchester United for a real life example. I vaguely remember someone making their debut at Old Trafford and one of their teammates telling them not to worry, because they'd have plenty of time to get back in shape before United were ready to attack! Van Gaal even tried to fix this problem by - in his words - "provoking space." Or in FM terms, going from high press to mid-block so that his forwards had somewhere to go when the ball was won. Briefly seemed to be working after the introduction of Rashford into the team who, along with Martial and Lingard, were an effective front 3 for that approach, for a time anyway. Teams started sitting deep and staying there, LVG had no other solution, and the football was utterly dire, whilst also being highly susceptible to counter attacks.

I think FM just hates centre backs with low/lowish Jumping Reach, pretty much no matter what you do. Part of the issue most have with Lisandro I imagine, and it seems to get worse the longer the saves go on. It also hates fullbacks with low crossing, so moving Timber to RB hardly helps. Maybe as a IWB he'd perform quite well, although he weirdly has low dribbling too, so probably won't make the line-breaking runs you might want from the position.

I've just noticed that in the training tab, under 'Rest', you actually can make it so that players on low condition can automatically be set to 'no pitch or gym work', so I guess it's already in the game! Wonder how long that's been there 🤔

You could even have him as an IF(a) man marking the nearest centre back. On a side note, that can be an effective way of taking advantage of a clear pace mismatch in transitions. Mbappe hanging out near Maguire for example...

On the off chance you're unaware, you can cntrl click, or better yet shift click to select multiple players at once, who you can then set to rest by right clicking. If the squad is sorted by selection it's a total of 4 clicks to rest your 1st eleven. Easy to forget to rest them in the first place though. An option to do it automatically could be nice, but I imagine that's moving away from reality since everyone probably fancies a day off once in a while!

The forum is back!

You mentioned the composure and along with the extremely high tempo your TI and mentality will be giving you, I imagine players are rushing shots a lot. The overall mentality is probably leading to even Rice and your wingbacks taking potshots, but that's just me speculating. With the team you have as well, if that's what you're playing at home, you might find that your players are rushing to exploit spaces that don't yet exist, since teams might be sitting deeper against you. I'd also be interested to know what you're aiming to achieve by playing you AM, CM, and DM in a straight line. I've never tried anything like that and it doesn't exactly scream 'passing angles' to me, so maybe that's also causing some low quality chances?

Gorgeous post.

The root cause of misinformation is almost always the absence of readily available and easily accessible truths. Perhaps it is time to update or add to some of those 3-year-old stickied threads? I would argue for the tooltips being sorted out, but that just obviously isn't ever going to happen. Anyway, on the actual topic, I don't know anything about these videos or anything, but it seems pretty clear watching games (2D classic probably helps) when the defence is stepping up or dropping off. I really like that it was added. Honestly before getting the game I just thought it was a bit of UI makeup for the old offside trap TI. Very happy to have been wrong about that.